#oh goooosh now that i have this im like... oh yea connecting the dots between this and fucking lala land

[variousqueerthings]

yeah woody allen cast that film intentionally w/the idea that he wanted to frame musicals as like… outpouring of emotion in daily life, something more grounded than like a fantasy musical where every character no matter how ordinary can sing. he intentionally asked goldie hawn who was the only Explicitly Trained vocalist to sing worse bc he intentionally wanted the movie to feel like “real people” singing. whether or not that…worked….and was a good choice……. is obviously a different Q

the irony here is that this movie isn't naturalistic or grounded at all, because everything is so obsessed with being oh so cool and Funny and Performatively Smart and new york chic, so it just comes off as someone who doesn't get the intention of musicals at all/doesn't like musicals perhaps/is afraid of the real emotions that (good) musicals are all about!

"I'm a guilty liberal who is the butt of the joke that we can reform prisoners, and the guy I helped is actually a creepy career criminal who uses this naïve rich girl's romanticization of the sexy criminal in order to commit more crime, ha... ha? anyway it's fine, because none of it matters, we're all just as fine at the end as we were at the beginning, except idk, who knows if I'll still be campaigning for prison reform, that's not really important."

woody allen is not "one of the people" or challenging an elite institution through form, the "ordinary life" he's portraying, is... not the ordinary life, and he's not even doing anything new, I've seen low-budget musicals that are made by a bunch of actual avant garde artists fucking about and that is something. this is. not.

I mean, hell, the 1993 cabaret performance with Jane Horrocks intentionally has her singing "worse" in order to juxtapose the character's dreams/illusions of becoming a great performer with the reality that she's in a seedy bar where men come to ogle her and the world is ending around her, but her own personal world is crumbling as well, that is intention!

(also am at the goldie hawn singing moment and she's clearly so much better lol -- alan alda wasn't bad either, + his main Moment was actually happening within the story, which made it work on multiple levels)

the thing I noticed is that when the movie does just allow itself to be a straight musical (ex. goldie hawn dancing moment, some of the ensemble stuff) it's just... better......

anyway: new york rich people stop making media about rich new yorkians as if they're relatable challenge, your life is not the norm

and since I'm doing this for alan alda (and I just finished it) I can say @majorbaby you wanna check out the 52min mark, which is his main singing moment + maybe the only genuine emotion in this movie alongside goldie hawn's singing moment (but that's at woody allen, so... eh), and that I don't know if I'm strong enough to watch another one for him. Teeth-pullingly agonising

I'm making a separate post about how I generally am establishing thoughts about alan alda roles, so that people don't have to engage with the woody allen movie if they don't want to...